


The Needs of the....oh you know how it goes

by TUNiU



Series: Tardigrades are Extremophiles [5]
Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: M/M, Precision F-Strike, Radiation Sickness, Spock is there for a few sentences, Tilly is there for a few sentences
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:42:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27428119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TUNiU/pseuds/TUNiU
Summary: What else is a man who can survive anything to do when the warp core fails critically? Of course this scenario was gonna be used in this series.
Relationships: Hugh Culber/Paul Stamets
Series: Tardigrades are Extremophiles [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1991209
Comments: 8
Kudos: 52





	The Needs of the....oh you know how it goes

The asteroid came out of nowhere. Rather, the 5 meter piece of ice and rock came along an interstellar path it had been travelling for billions of years. The rock intersected The Discovery's heading and slipped through the deflector shield in the 0.00000000019% odds of failure endemic to the Crossfield class spaceships. Discovery being the only ship of that class still in existence, no one had ever catalogued the error, until the asteroid flew through the deflector field and smashed into the hull plating. In the second it took the inertial dampeners to compensate, the crew had already been flung about by the impact.

On the bridge, the crew immediately rushed back to their stations. There they could query the ship’s systems for information.

"Report!" Captain Christopher Pike demanded, climbing back into his seat. 

"Sensors show something hit us," said Lt. Owosekun, clicking through alerts on her screen.

"No change to flight path," stated Lt. Detmer at the helm.

At communications, Lt. Bryce relayed, "Decks 4 through 6 reporting hull breaches. Minor casualties."

"Emergency force fields are holding," Lt. Owosekun added.

"Engineering is requesting a ship's evacuation!" Cmdr. Saru exclaimed to the captain, his voice overtaking everyone else’s reports.

Chris turned in his seat to look at him and asked, "What?" He clicked the communications button on his chair and demanded, "Engineering report!"

" _We have a massive reactor misalignment_ ," Paul Stamets replied over the comm. 

"How bad?"

" _Blow up in fifteen minutes bad. Recommend all non essential personnel abandon ship, just in case_."

"Essential being?"

" _Us in engineering_."

Chris nodded at Bryce, who tapped his console. Immediately, every console and padd on the ship began flashing the command: _Abandon Ship_. The computer also announced it over the speakers. Crewmen on every deck dropped what they were doing and headed towards the nearest lifepod. Within seconds, the ship started janking with the release of dozens of pods from the hull. 

The bridge crew all looked at each other nervously, none of them wanting to be the first to abandon their captain. Michael and Saru stared at each other over the captain’s head. Chris could understand neither of them wanting to lose another captain. Chris would be their third captain in as many years. It was admirable. But, Chris believed in the old adage, the captain always went down with the ship.

"Go," Chris told them. 

They shuffled out, unable to meet Chris's eyes as he stayed seated in the captain's chair. It took only minutes for almost the entire ship’s complement to evacuate into the escape pods. When the bridge was empty, Chris stood up and sat at Lt. Owosekun's station so he could keep an eye on the situation. He called up a video feed from engineering security cameras and flicked it up so it showed on the viewscreen.

"Everyone's gone," Chris told Paul over the comms.

Paul clicked at his console then said, " _you're not_."

"It's my ship."

Paul whined nasally, " _not really_." he snarked pointlessly.

Chris's view of the Engineering department showed Paul and Spock tapping furiously at consoles in front of a reactor hatch. Nearby, Ensign Sylvia Tilly had her body half in a conduit quite literally ripping wires and connectors away from the wall, trying to create a circuit break, uncaring of the damage since stopping the ship exploding was more important than a few broken pieces.

"Can you fix this?" Chris demanded. 

He tapped at the screen, telling the computer to run survival probabilities for the lifepods running away from the ship if the ship's warp core were to detonate. The odds weren't good: a few of the crew would live--those who were in the pods that had launched first and thus gotten farthest away.

Paul stopped typing. " _Right now the only way is to realign the coupler manually_ ," he explained.

"Do it," Chris commanded. He hated that he didn't even hesitate, didn't stop to run an ethics equation.

Tilly pulled herself out of the conduit. " _The radiation levels are too high right now,_ " she pointed out. " _He'll get a lethal dose_."

" _The captain knows this_ ," Spock said.

Paul backed away from his console. He stared at the ceiling angrily for a short moment. “ _Hugh is gonna hate this so much_ ,” he muttered. 

The reaction couplers for the warp core lay beyond several locking doors. The first was merely glass lined with warning verbiage written upon it. The next set of doors were lead lined, and the warnings were larger. The final door, six feet thick, never opened while the core was active. Paul had to unscrew a tiny maintenance hatch and literally climb his way through the wall and across load bearing joists to get to the other side and the other maintenance hatch. There were no cameras where Paul was. Chris tracked his path by his transponder location using the internal sensors. Paul’s path stopped at the reaction chamber, where it stayed for several minutes until...

The computer reported all systems normal. 

“ _He did it_ ,” Tilly said sadly.

The dot that was Paul on Chris’s screen began moving. Slower. He backtracked his path through the wall, past each lead lined door and stopped in the chamber formed behind the glass door. He was back in camera view. 

Paul gingerly sat himself cross legged on the floor. “ _I can’t see_ ,” he complained. He rested his elbows on the knees and his head in his hands.

Tilly gasped. She sat on the other side of the glass. “ _Paul…_ ”

Spock turned away to give them privacy. He began tapping commands for a safe shut down of the engines.

“ _Tell Hugh...”_ Paul began speaking to Tilly. 

Chris turned off the video. It was a private thing. As the man who ordered Paul to his last moments, Chris felt he didn't also have the right to his last words. He instead turned his attention to coordinating the return of the crew in their various pods.

* * *

Hugh Culber disembarked the cramped lifepod moments after its secure linking back to the ship. He and the other medical personnel had made sure to spread themselves across several pods, in case anything had happened. His pod had been one of the last to leave because he had been waiting for Paul to tell him he was safe on another lifepod. But Paul had never called. Hugh had had to stop waiting. He couldn’t let the others in their seats suffer for his inability to leave without his husband. So he’d sealed the hatch and let the lifepod detach, knowing Paul was still onboard. Being last to leave, meant his pod was now the first to return. Hugh took one step through the lock into Discovery and bumped into Tilly. She directed the others to Engineering. They all hurried off, leaving Hugh starting at Tilly for a confused moment.

“It’s Paul,” she said, and Hugh started running.

He quickly outpaced Tilly, in too much of a desperation to even slow and listen to what more she had to say. He ran so hard that every time he met a corner, his hand whipped out to grab at the wall to help his turning. It felt like he would never reach Engineering, even though the ship wasn’t that large and he hadn’t started so far away.

There were a couple of nurses standing around the reaction chamber when Hugh burst through the still opening doors. When they saw who it was, they backed away and let Hugh see Paul on the wrong side of the locked door.

“What have you done?” Hugh cried out. He ran down the steps and across the room. The door separating him from Paul did not automatically slide open. The radiation warnings flashed on the various monitors in the room. Hugh found himself kneeling up against the glass. “Paul?” he asked.

Paul lifted his head from his hands. He looked, blindly, in Hugh’s general direction. “Hugh, you’re here?” Paul answered tiredly.

To Paul, Hugh said, “I’m here, baby.” To Spock, Hugh asked, “how much radiation did he absorb?”

Spock looked up from his console. “Enough that he should have died twenty minutes ago,” he answered plainly.

Hugh cried out in shock.

“We don’t think he _is_ going to die,” Tilly offered.

He commanded one of the nurses for a tricorder. They handed it to him. Hugh tried to scan Paul through the glass, but the results were garbled, both from the barrier and the ambient radiation in the chamber.

Paul tilted his head at the noise. “I don’t think there’s anything you can do for me right now,” he said consolingly. His eyes still didn’t meet Hugh’s. 

Hugh moved his head side to side to change his eyeline, but Paul didn’t react. “Your eyes.”

“I can’t see.”

He let his head fall forward against the glass, as he swallowed back his despair.

“Please don’t cry,” Paul commanded. “It doesn’t hurt, nothing hurts right now.”

“That’s your nerves being destroyed by the radiation,” Hugh explained helplessly.

“Ah. Sorry.”

It would take an hour for the radiation to drain enough from the chamber to remove Paul. Spock told them there was nothing they could do but wait.

Paul scooted over to the wall so he could sit leaning in the corner. He coughed from the exertion, and a spray of blood impacted the glass. He licked his lips at the taste, and said “oh,” in a small voice.

The coughing didn’t stop. Paul coughed and coughed, at first aiming delicately into his elbow, but eventually the great hacking coughs had him bent over his lap. When he was done, blood covered his face and clothes.

“This sucks,” he told Hugh, still on the other side of the glass.

“Just let it out,” Hugh told him. “It’ll be okay,” he lied. He didn’t know if Paul could come back from this. It looked like the exposure effects were catching up to him, even as the radiation levels in the chamber lowered.

Time passed, and Paul slowly deteriorated until he was laying on his side, skin weeping from open sores, barely breathing, blood constantly streaming from his nose and mouth.

The moment Spock said, “all clear,” Hugh pushed open the glass door, faster than it could slide itself open. He grabbed a barely responsive Paul and lifted him onto the waiting stretcher. His tissues were in such a state of radiation led decay that even the minute radiation caused by the transporter would do too much harm. The nurses ran wheeling Paul away to sickbay as Hugh followed in his now bloody white uniform.

* * *

The first new sensation Paul was aware of was a cloth over his eyes. Instinctively, he reached up with one hand to move it. Hugh’s cold hand grabbed his wrist. 

“Don’t,” Hugh said softly. “We had to regenerate your eyes, too much light right now will affect the healing.” He brought Paul’s hand back down to the bed’s surface. 

“How long was I out?” Paul asked. He grabbed at Hugh’s hand and held it tightly in his own. Hugh’s hands were always colder than his, and right now it served as a sharp sensation, when everything around Paul was darkness and the benign gentleness of sickbay.

Hugh sighed. He stroked Paul’s hair with his free hand. “Nine hours. You went through nearly every stage of radiation sickness short of dying, before rapidly healing.”

“But I’m okay now?”

“Almost, the augments were destroyed. I was about to replace those when you woke up.”

Paul winced. Getting his arm ports put in the first time was an exercise in grossness. He had had to be awake to help Hugh map the neuron sensations. It had been a lot of *poke*, “what did that do?”, *poke*, “what did that do?” all the while actually seeing his arm flayed open because of course his curiosity had led him to look because he thought it would be groovy.

Even under the cloth, his expression showed through. “Don’t give me that face,” Hugh rubbed at the crease between Paul’s eyebrows, though the fabric. “I can do it now if you give me a few minutes.”

Paul agreed. Hugh kissed his forehead and walked away. Paul heard Hugh gathering supplies from cabinets, instructing the computer to synthesize special equipment from the replicator. While Hugh was preparing, Paul catalogued himself in the blind darkness. His skin felt quite normal, under the sheet covering his chest. He seemed to recall bleeding from a lot of places there at the end. 

“No clothes?” he called out to Hugh.

“You’re lucky you’re wearing underwear,” Hugh called back to him. “Do you know the amount of regenerating we had to do?”

A tray wheeled its squeaky way over to Paul’s side.

“You ready?” Hugh asked.

Paul lay his arms at his sides, turned up so the augments were easily reachable. “I am at your mercy,” he joked, safe in his own personal darkness, with Hugh at his side.

“Maybe later,” Hugh quipped and injected Paul’s left arm with a nerve-block.

The bulk of the augment ports on Paul’s arms were primarily a protective covering. Hugh peeled away the bio-plastic sheath and dropped it onto the tray with a dull tink. Then was a slight tugging against Paul’s skin as Hugh sliced the skin away from the connection. Even through the nerve block, Paul felt it when the permanent conductive port was pulled out tugging on the several nerve cords it was attached to. It wasn’t pain, it didn’t hurt. It did however, feel like his arm was flipping inside out. It was a very quick sensation, as Hugh swapped out the fried conductors with fresh materials, gently placed the apparatus back within Paul’s skin, and then regenerated the permanent fissure to its smallest size. He followed this up by applying a new bio-plastic covering.

Hugh wheeled his tray over to Paul’s other side and repeated the procedure. In the darkness behind his eyelids, every sensation was amplified. Everytime Hugh’s hands brushed Paul’s skin, he got a tiny chill, and a tiny thrill. 

Paul heard the doors to sickbay swish open and someone walked in.

“Doctor Culber,” spoke the captain.

“Yes?” Hugh asked.

“May we speak privately?”

“Sure, I’m done anyways,” Hugh said.

Paul heard them walk to the sickbay office and speak.

“Your husband was a very brave man,” Captain Pike said. “He saved a hundred lives today. I’m going to recommend he be promoted to Commander--”

“Don’t you dare,” Paul found himself shouting in interruption. He sat up in the bed, in shock. The fabric covering his eyes fell off, and the room revealed itself in blurry colors to his vision.

“--posthumously,” Pike continued, then shouted, “ _What the fuck_!?” The captain lurched his way out of the office and stared at Paul in ghastly shock.

Hugh followed a step behind him. He continued around Pike and headed straight for Paul. He pushed his husband back down onto the bed and put the cloth back over his eyes.

“My god, I can barely stand the paperwork of a lieutenant commander,” Paul continued, complaining, “don’t you dare promote me.”

“What do you mean posthumously?” Hugh asked.

“You’re not dead,” Pike stated. “You’re supposed to be dead. I watched you walk into an irradiated warp core and no one told me you could survive it.”

“To be fair, I didn't know I would survive it,” Paul offered.

Hugh muttered, “That never makes it better.”

“He does this a lot?” Pike asked him.

“It does seem to keep happening,” Hugh answered bluntly.

“You act as though I like sacrificing myself,” Paul argued. “It hurts, every time!” He pouted under his eye covering.

Instantly, Hugh deflated. “I know it does,” he agreed. He grabbed onto Paul’s hand and squeezed it tightly in apology.

“How many times have you not-died for this crew?” Pike asked in awe.

“Six,” said Paul at the same time as Hugh said, “five.”

“Five,” Paul corrected himself, too quickly.

“What was six?” Hugh asked, pointedly.

“I’m counting the time loops.”

“Then it’s more like 206.”

“And you don't want a promotion?” Pike asked to be sure.

“Oh god, no. This ship has too many commanders already.

“Is there anything you do want?”

Paul shrugged. “Not real--”

“He’ll take a week’s leave,” Hugh answered.

Paul whipped the cloth off his eyes so he could look Hugh in the face as he said, “I don’t need a week’s leave.”

Hugh grabbed the fabric and held it down over Paul’s eyes. “Two weeks,” he countered.

“Hugh! Stop it.”

“Three weeks. You just absorbed enough radiation to kill all of Kansas, keep talking I’ll recommend four weeks.”

“Three weeks it is,” Pike said, agreeing with Hugh. “Good night gentlemen,” he said in closing. The doors swished open and shut as the captain left.

Now that they were alone again, Paul felt within his rights to flick his head up under Hugh’s grip, so that he could kiss Hugh’s palm in a sneak attack. Hugh let his forehead rest against Paul’s. Their noses rubbed each other’s cheeks in a nudging closeness.

“Three weeks?” Paul asked.

“You need the rest, trust me.”

“Whatever will I do?”

“Sleep,” Hugh told him bluntly.

Paul waggled his eyebrows jauntily, “with you?” he asked hopefully.

“Oh honey no. Not until the last of the radiation clears your cells.”

“And how long will that be?”

“Three weeks.”

Paul groaned a massive drawn out sound that lasted a lot longer than it should have for coming from a fifty year old man.

“This. Is. What. You. Get. For. Irradiating. Your. Dick.” Hugh told him in a singsong that included booping his nose on select words.

Paul tried to bite Hugh’s finger, though being unable to see, he had no real idea where it was. He ended up just biting at the air as Hugh snorted at him.

“Right now, I want you to take a nap,” Hugh said, rubbing his hair back soothingly. He pulled up the sheet so that it covered Paul’s arms and wrapped it around his shoulders. “Your entire body just went through some...crazy shit.”

“Is that your expert medical opinion?”

“Yes, shush.”

The light level dimmed until the darkness behind Paul’s eyes was a uniform black, instead of the dull grey it had been through the cloth. Hugh’s lips met his own in a long slow kiss that left Paul feeling relaxed.

It was a good sensation in which to fall asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Why yes, I did just recycle the idea from Wrath of Khan and Into Darkness. Because why not. It's such a good concept.
> 
> I put Spock in the room to see Paul sacrifice himself getting irradiated to fix the warp core, because Spock had to get the idea from somewhere. Of course, in putting Spock in the room, that places this story in season 2. when Hugh was not really with the Culmets relationship, when he also wasn't busy being dead.
> 
> So lets pretend Hugh came back and had his angst fest and figured it all out a lot sooner. 
> 
> Also, Did you know Anthony Rapp was born in 1971? Which makes him nearly 50 years old. I did not know this until I had to google this fact for a single line in this fic.


End file.
